I know I am updating this blog after such a long time. It was busy week for me catching up with many things at once, so that my customers and I can go on long great holiday. As we are coming to an end of 2011, BRM (BMC Recovery Manager for Databases) has really entered into era of solutions. As once said better be late than never. Similarly BRM has slowly and steadily moved its strategic base of being stand alone product to being a part of complete IT Database Management solution.

BRM-BBDA (BMC Bladelogic Database Automation) is one of such jumps which made it possible.

BBDA is a provisioning tool which helps system admins and database admins to upgrade or patch OS and/or databases through centralized console. It helps you bring down the time to upgrade or patch your IT environment. Hence reduces the down time.

Through this it opens lot of doors to BRM users as well as BBDA users. Today we will discuss the "Install Action" one of the features this integration provides, through this blog post.

Prerequisite to use 'install action': BBDA must be installed on it's supported platform and BRM product must be downloaded on your BBDA machine. Then using this install action you can perform the installation of BRM on your specific OS/machines where you want to perform backups of databases.

You need to use the specific SQL-BackTrack under BRM blue bundle to backup particular database (Oracle, Sybase, SQL-Server, DB2, etc). There are separate install actions depending on SQL-BackTrack. Hence you need to be careful while loading the action through BBDA.

You need to create this action with "scope of node". Scope is a term used in BBDA to specify how you want to spawn any action on multiple machines. Nodes here represent machines/servers. With this install action you can deploy BRM on multiple hosts. So now BBDA can do the provisioning of BRM as well.

In tern making provisioning of database patches and version a more secure and safe gaurded process. As BBDA will have this as very first step towards database patch and version provisioning, followed by backups. So when you apply patches to database which don't go very well sometimes, you can revert back to data which you already backed up.

For details on how to use this action please refer to BRM BBDA integration getting started guide. It is available on BMC site at following location: